Super Fuzz

I have been obsessed with Super Fuzz since I was eight years old, when it seemed like HBO played it twice a day for several years. It is a movie only an 8-12 year old could love, but if you are like me and super immature, you might watch this as an adult and love it too. I’m pretty sure Super Fuzz is the reason I’m obsessed with B grade Italian movies to this day. It has everything an 80s Italian movie needs: the relentless Italo disco soundtrack, one name-brand American actor (Ernest Borgnine), a Florida setting, a really cute girl (Julie Gordon, also of Florida slasher stinker Blood Rage), dumb mobsters, a dog track subplot, and an Italian dude whose English is dubbed by someone else who speaks Italian-accented English. The only thing missing is a bottle of J&B!

Terence Hill, best known as Bud Spencer’s comedy partner, stars as rookie cop Dave Speed. They say that Hill got his start in movies because he looks like Franco Nero, but to me, Nero looks like Hill because I saw Hill first! Speed gets caught in a nuclear test blast and acquires super powers, which enable him to do things like see around a corner, telekinetically move a truck that is double parked, survive a fall from several stories (twice!), or read a comic book while floating on the ceiling. Because he is an idiot, he mostly uses his powers to do things like fetch a cup of coffee, or make everyone at a football game disappear so he can kiss his girlfriend. But eventually he accidentally looks through a truckload of frozen fish and has to do some police work when he realizes someone is transporting counterfeit one dollar bills inside the fish. That someone is the dumb mafia mentioned earlier, hence the small bills.

Unfortunately, when Speed sees the color red, his powers temporarily disappear. His partner, Borgnine, is in love with an aging movie star (Joanne Dru) who is dating the mob boss, and foolishly reveals to her the secret to disrupting Speed’s super powers. This helps the bad guys to kill him and frame Dave Speed for the murder, meaning most of the movie is a flashback from Speed’s perspective as he sits on death row. Luckily, even in Florida it is hard to kill a guy with super powers, so he manages to escape and bring his partner back to life. That way a grateful Borgnine can’t object to Speed marrying his niece (Gordon), but will she agree to marry a guy with pesky super powers?

Wait, just why is she annoyed with her fiance’s super powers in the first place? That sounds awesome to me, and it doesn’t hurt that Terence Hill is hot. And why does Speed spend a third of the movie chasing down a carnival sideshow dog ventriloquist who he thinks can explain the variations in his powers just because the ventriloquist saw him fall off a building twice? Where is it written that ventriloquists are experts on super powers? Those are just two reasons why Super Fuzz is a terrible movie, another being, obviously, that it’s a cheap Italian movie set in Florida and therefore probably didn’t even have a script. When the characters aren’t punching each other, or making goofy faces, they’re getting over the misunderstanding that Dave Speed has died (four times), or that Borgnine has (twice). And yet I couldn’t love Super Fuzz more.

You will find versions of Super Fuzz for sale online under the title Super Snooper, but that is not the right version. Super Snooper is an inferior cut with a different voiceover than the one I fell in love with in 1983. You are better off watching Super Fuzz on YouTube via the playlist I have linked below, or uncut on Ultra Toxic TV if you have a Roku. I urge you to watch this wherever you can, while you’re still young enough to enjoy it!

Not to show my age, but I remember the commercials for this one playing on TV when I was eleven or twelve (back when damn near anything could play in a theater). Of course, I also remember the TV spots for SUSPIRIA, GATES OF HELL, THE HOWLING, FRIDAY THE 13TH and (sigh) THE EXORCIST, among others. Even the commercials for SUPERFUZZ were a bit off!

I was about 10 when I first saw the movie as a kid in Switzerland. Was called Supercop here. Fell in love with the movie, thank God I recorded it on VHS an watched it again and again. I still love the title song and bought the super snooper vinyl record a couple of years ago to hang up on my wall.
I remember being infatuated by Julie Gordon and putting that scene with her in the red bathing suit in slow motion, she was so blazing hot.